Liberty Alone

I have long admired David Davis’s stance on civil liberties. He is definitely on the liberal end of the Tory party, preferring to oppose state intrusion into people’s lives (although like most politicians he fails to take this that far).

This is an interesting move on his part, and one which clearly signals his discontent with the authoritarian members of the Tory party.

I also support the decision not to stand a Liberal Democrat against him. This does go beyond party politics into far more important issues.

In the past, libertarians tended to defend actually existing capitalism because the most likely alternative model was much worse. Capitalists also were willing to talk about the value of free markets, even if they wanted protection - the reason being that they needed an apologetic that was not naked class privilege. With the collapse of orthodox socialism, however, the capitalists have dropped even their free market rhetoric, and we can start thinking about more free market alternatives. That is why people like Kevin Carson are so important. He reminds us that libertarianism is not the same as Tesco minus the State.

Sean Gabb on the Libertarian Alliance blog

libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.

Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.

Karl Hess - Libertarian Forum Vol I. No. VI

These show why the Conservative Party is not the natural home of truly principled libertarians. The Conservative ideology is to entrench the current system of privilege and ownership.

The nature of property is a difficult problem, libertarians run the gamut from Locke to Proudhon, but they always accentuate that property should be justly acquired, not taken through force.

Because that’s what some seem to think.

I get the impression that many LibDems think we should vote for Ken Livingstone so we can keep Boris, and by extension, the Tories out of power.

If I was in politics to keep the Tories out of power I’d have joined the Labour Party. That is not my aim however, my aim to to promote liberalism and freedom for the individual. The party I judge to be best positioned to work towards this is the Liberal Democrats.

Frankly, I find the Tories, in general, slightly less odious than the current Labour Party, although I’ll grant you that in some areas the Tories are worse (in my home town they’re both equally despicable and I couldn’t vote for either) and they leave a massive amount to be desired.
True, there are the old Tory snobs and a fair smattering of idiots, but at least their snobbery and idiocy is out there for all to see. The Labour party contains its fair share of such people, but they hide behind being ‘progressive’ and ‘left wing’ which supposedly makes it all okay.

When it comes to the mayoral elections - I believe Brian Paddick would genuinely make the best Mayor - and that’s not just party loyalty speaking. After that however I see the twin horrors of Ken and Boris. Out of the two, I find Boris less objectionable. He at least has some liberal bones in his body unlike Ken who is an enemy of all things liberal and free.
I also rather like inefficient politicians, they’re less likely to get things done, encouraging us to depend less on government and more on individual and community efforts.

Frankly, if the London Mayor has so much power that he could destroy London then he has too much power unfortunately the only way to drive this home would be for someone to abuse that power, perhaps then we can start acting to reducing the power of politicians.

Acknowledging the fact that Brian Paddick is very unlikely to win, I’d rather have Boris with an Assembly which will oppose him than anything else. For me, Boris is just the lesser of two evils.

I find it funny that the leftist, Labour supporting, media is screaming about the Tory party lurching to the right…

Why?
Because on the issues which they actually are being right wing on, namely law and order and immigration they’re saying the same things as the Government. Hardly a lurch to the right there…

Needless to say, I disagree with both parties on these issues, but there isn’t really much to choose between them, except perhaps Labour is better at spin and has the difficulty of actually implementing policy.

Guy Herbert has a good article here about how timid the proposed regulatory cuts are and the massive increase in government spending on bureaucracy this country has suffered under Labour.

Added with the fact that regulatory compliance costs have not been measured these cuts in regulation are not that big.

Given that there is no cut in spending, there is no cut in taxation and there’s no cut in tax revenues as well as this being a report from a working group not party policy why is the world aflame with ‘Tory lurch to the right’ stories? It looks like everyone has fallen for the Government and its media line…

It looks to me that there are some sensible proposals here. What the LibDems should have done is stood up and said ‘good try guys, there’s some good ideas, but these bits don’t work and its a bit timid’ and suggested our own set of bureaucratic spending cuts.
We are meant to be liberals, that means in this country wanting to limit the size of government. Even if we support the current welfare state, there’s still a huge number of places to cut the state back.

As anyone who knows me probably knows, one of my biggest annoyances is the way the word liberalism has been perverted by socialists, statists and conservatives to mean the opposite of what it originally meant. I’ve just come across a perfect example which shows how little this modern, American ‘liberalism’ differs from conservatism:

To lay a ghost at the outset and to dismiss semantics, a liberal is here defined as one who believes in utilizing the full force of government for the advancement of social, political, and economic justice at the municipal, state, national, and international levels…. A liberal believes government is a proper tool to use in the development of a society which attempts to carry Christian principles of conduct into practical effect.

Senator Joseph S. Clark, Jr. - Atlantic, July 1953, p. 27

Okay, so ‘liberals’ differ from conservatives in many of their ends, a ‘liberal’ has a different conception of justice and to day these so-called liberals shirk away from religion more, but the essence is the same, the government must use force and coercion to impose what politicians think is best. The argument is then simply about what should be forced upon people rather than is this the legitimate purpose of government, what is its ends and wouldn’t leaving the individual free to run their own lives be better.

Sometimes I get asked why I’m not a Tory. Apparently this is because I’m broadly a libertarian (although I am really a radical liberal) and the Tory party is apparently the natural home for libertarians (I’ve never succeeded in working out why - it goes against all the history of the Tories until the anti-socialism of Thatcher adopted some libertarian positions).

Cicero explains one of the reasons I cannot be a Tory, ably assisted by Iain Dale.

I may disagree with many LibDems, I may disagree on party policy, but at the roots there is a core of liberalism in the LibDems, a core which I believe can be nurtured.
At the heart of the Tories is reactionary conservatism and defense of vested interests.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all Tories are bad, there are many liberal Tories, but they do not represent the fundamentals of the party. They, of course, will argue that I am as delusional as I think they are about the prospects for a liberal/libertarian Tory party when it comes to the LibDems ;)

At least according to readers of The Register.

In an online poll to see who should play Iggy Pop, Lord Tebbit won a landslide victory with 78% of the vote.

There are however allegations of vote rigging by Conservative Central Office.

If there’s one thing guaranteed to put people off politics I think it must be politicians and political bloggers after elections.

The Tories had a good result, you’d expect them to be rather crowing. I will take it as a compliment that many Tories have been attacking the LibDems far more than Labour - it shows that they are taking us seriously, even if they pretend that we’re not a threat.

Labour had a very poor result, yet to hear Labour MPs and pundits its not that bad. Its even a good platform for a general election win apparently. Come on, admit it, for the most part you did horribly and you are losing support in the country.

The Liberal Democrats also had a generally poor election. Perhaps its possible to spin bits of it - we did gain some ground against both the Tories and Labour in some areas, but we lost it, especially to the Tories, in other areas. We must admit that, and look at why and what we can do.

Personally, I think that we must evaluate the party and be staunchly liberal. I hear people saying so often that they don’t know what we stand for - true its difficult to get our policies across being the third party and true people not knowing what the Greens really stand for helps them enourmously, but we must start getting ideas across.
We must stop talking about liberal democracy and start talking of liberalism. Focus leaflets should espouse liberalism and frame our policies in the terms of liberalism. We must consider radical liberal policies and espouse individual freedom, rights and responsibilities.
We must seek to show we want to enable people to take control of their lives, to stop keeping people from having opportunity which they’d have without the government policies.

Everything we do should have the overriding theme of liberalism, of freedom and the individual. We must show why individualism isn’t selfish. We must stand on principle against interference in people’s lives, we must allow people to make their own decisions, even if the consequences to themselves are negative.

Everything we do should be based around a message of liberalism. In this age of spin and blandness we have an opportunity to put forward a liberal vision, to take the debate from the moribund left/right debate to one of liberty vs. authority, the individual vs. collectivism and of freedom vs. coercion.

We are the party with the strongest uniting principles, we should demonstrate them and promote them.

There’s quite a few fairly liberal people out there who often call themselves libertarians. They like to talk about individual freedom, free trade, free markets, all good liberal stuff.

They then throw all that out of the window by talking about the great threat of immigration. Perhaps only people in the country they live in are allowed the freedom to make the best of their lives? The only libertarian view I can see is that free movement of people should be allowed. If the state’s job is to protect those people in the state from violence then they can still do that whilst allowing people into the country. To assume that the immigrant is intent on violence against those already in the country is quite frankly racist.

This is the case with UKIP who are generally a small government liberal party but throw it all out when it comes to nationalism and immigration where they tend towards the nationalist and xenophobic.

This puts me in mind of the clash which brought about Thatcherism. Thatcher was heavily influenced by liberals like Hayek and Friedman, but was also a conservative and a nationalist. She sought to free people economically but failed to accept liberalism in the social and international sphere. She therefore created a strange hybrid which worked both for and against freedom. She privatised state monopolies and freed up the economy a huge amount, but also centralised power and encouraged jingoism and nationalism.

This has had the unfortunate effect of tainting the free market ideas of liberalism for many, a process which has continued with New Labour’s pretense of free market reforms whilst garnering more power to the centre.
It also means that many look towards the Tories for liberal ideas, and with Cameron’s rise and increased statism they look towards UKIP. The Liberal Democrats are dismissed as nannying, high taxing statist meddlers (a reputation we sometimes deserve it must be said).